With ‘Play,’ Google Serves Up Its iTunes Moment

The new default home screen for Google's web-facing media portal. Photo courtesy of Google

Google unveiled Google Play on Tuesday, a grand plan to unify all the media it serves up from various portals to one recognizable brand identity and location. Call it Google’s iTunes moment.

Instead of separating media by category — Google Music, Android Market, Google Books — all of Google’s disparate sources will be accesible from a very iTunes-like storefront, accessible via the web or through apps on Android smartphones and tablets.

“This is about going beyond just Android,” said Google engineering director Chris Yerga in an interview.

It’s a branding thing, sure, but more than that. It’s part of a maturing process that Google’s steady introduction of cloud-based media options has more or less compelled. Even as Android devices rose to a position of market leadership over the past four years, Google’s content-side efforts have floundered; Google took 2.5 years to unveil an Android app web store, and more than three years to launch its music retail service.

Success may hinge as much on a simpler experience as what sounds … inviting. Do you prefer the word “Android,” or “Play?”

As one would hope, your files won’t move, your past purchases won’t change. And as always, you’ll log in with your Google account information to access all of your content from mobile devices or the web.

As big a step Google Play is, not a great deal will change. Movies, music and apps aren’t going anywhere; instead, they’ll be rebranded across the app and web interfaces. The Google Music app, for instance, becomes “Play Music” on your Android devices. Google Books, similarly, changes to “Play Books.” But gone is “Android Market” — in name only. Google rebranded the market as the “Play Store,” which, like the Market, will be available both on the web and on phones and tablets.

The unification exercise aims to address a natural fragmentation which came from rolling out services piecemeal. Android Market, for instance, made sense as a go-to destination for Android apps, programs to be used on Android devices. But Google Music users may not be inclined to go to — or even think of going to — the Android Market for MP3 purchases. And Google Books was practically off in its own orbit, with a web store entirely separate from the Android Market until recently.

Contrast this with Apple’s iTunes model, a desktop application which pre-dates even the iPod (and all of mobile) and funnels all Apple-sold music, movies and books through one unified, idiot-proof storefront.

Google’s unification efforts, though, aren’t as simple as Apple’s early iTunes days. Part of Android’s great allure has been its ability to sync content across devices wirelessly, with no need to hardwire your smartphone or tablet in to your laptop for app or music file transfer. That’s been Apple’s greatest negative (until the recent launch of iCloud), and Google’s biggest potential advantage.

It’s a start. Ultimately, Google needs to execute well to boost its mobile content bottom line. In Apple’s last fiscal quarter alone, iTunes sales accounted for $1.7 billion in company revenues. Google isn’t sharing any information on its mobile content sales business (which isn’t a good sign), but has seen over 10 billion app downloads, and has cultivated a customer base of over 4 million Google Music users since the service’s full roll-out in November.

U.S. users should expect to see the changes appear in the form of Google app updates and a web portal face lift in the coming days. Only limited offerings will appear in Canada, the U.K., Australia and Japan for now, though Google has made it clear the initiative will eventually be a global one.